Simone de Beauvoir: Being Born a Woman Is Not a Destiny

In 1949, a French philosopher published a book that opened with a sentence that can still leave you speechless today. The sentence was this: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Eight words that forever changed the way humanity thinks about gender, identity, and what it means to be a person. The book was called The Second Sex. And the woman who wrote it was Simone de Beauvoir.

To understand Beauvoir, you first need to understand the world she was born into. Paris, 1908. That's two years before the first Palace of Fine Arts opened in Mexico City, to give you a sense of the era. The world was completely different. Women in France still couldn't vote — that wouldn't come until 1944. Universities were beginning to open their doors to women, but barely. The dominant idea was that a woman had a natural destiny: marry, have children, stay home. That was the script. That was what "a woman" did.

Simone was born into a bourgeois, upper-middle-class, practicing Catholic family. Her father was a lawyer and a man of letters. He loved literature, theater, and intellectual conversation. And Simone absorbed all of it from a young age with an impressive voraciousness. She read constantly. By age twelve she had already decided she was going to be a writer. At fifteen, in a moment of brutal adolescent clarity, she declared she didn't believe in God. For a bourgeois Catholic family in early twentieth-century Paris, that was a small bomb.

But Simone wasn't the type to explode and go quiet. She was the type to explode and keep pushing.

The Meeting with Sartre and the Essential Pact

When she reached university, Beauvoir enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to study philosophy. And here comes the first fact that will surprise you: in 1929, when she completed her studies and took the agrégation exam to become a philosophy teacher — a brutally difficult exam that the best students in France take — she ranked second. First place went to Jean-Paul Sartre. And the jury, years later, publicly admitted that Beauvoir was actually the more brilliant of the two, but they gave first place to Sartre because he was a man with more experience. Beauvoir was twenty-one years old. She was the ninth woman in French history to earn that qualification.

Sartre and Beauvoir met during preparation for that exam. And what began as an intellectual relationship became something that had no name at the time and is still hard to define today. It wasn't a traditional romance. It wasn't a marriage. It was a pact. The two agreed to have an open relationship, one of absolute equality, without legal commitments, without children, without the traditional couple structure. They called each other "the essential relationship." They would have other loves — they did. But that core of two, that ongoing conversation that lasted decades, that was the essential relationship.

Many people built entire careers trying to explain whether it was a romantic arrangement, an intellectual contract, an unbalanced power dynamic, or a radical model of freedom. The truth is it was probably all of those things at once. And Beauvoir knew it. She wrote about it. She didn't deceive herself.

But let's get back to the philosophy.

Existentialism and the Condition of Women

Beauvoir was an existentialist. And if you've read Episode 10, about Sartre, you already know what we mean when we say existentialism. The central idea is that existence precedes essence. Put simply: there is no fixed human nature that defines what you are before you start living. First you exist. Then, through your choices, your actions, your history, you build who you are. There is no prior essence. There is no destiny. You are what you do.

Sartre applied that idea to the human condition in general. Beauvoir grabbed it and took it into territory that Sartre never explored with the same depth: the condition of women.

And there lies the core of everything.

Beauvoir asked: what does it mean to be a woman? Not from biology. Not from anatomy. But from lived experience. From history. From culture. From power relations. And what she found was disturbing.

She found that in all cultures, in all historical periods, women had been defined in relation to men. Man was the universal subject. The center. The measure of all things. Woman was the Other. With a capital O. The Other who is not the center but the periphery. The one who exists in relation to the first. As if humanity had a protagonist and a supporting character, and the casting had been decided before either could have a say.

Why? Beauvoir wasn't satisfied with saying "because that's how the world is." She asked why. And the answer she found was philosophical and, at the same time, very concrete: because femininity is not an essence, not something women are born with. It is a construction. A set of roles, expectations, behaviors, and values that society assigns to those born with certain bodies, and that those people learn to embody from childhood.

One is not born a woman. One becomes a woman. Every girl who grows up, grows up in a world that keeps telling her how she should be, what she should like, how she should move, talk, feel, and desire. She is told she must be sweet, patient, generous, accommodating. She is told her fulfillment lies in others: in her husband, in her children. She is told her body is an object of desire, but that desire doesn't belong to her. And gradually, through the accumulation of all those messages, that girl constructs an identity she believes is natural, believes is hers, but which was in fact manufactured by a society that needed her in that place.

> Femininity is not an essence, not something women are born with. It is a construction. A set of roles, expectations, behaviors, and values that society assigns to those born with certain bodies, and that those people learn to embody from childhood.

This doesn't mean that differences between men and women don't exist. Beauvoir was not denying biology. It means those differences don't explain or justify subordination. The female body has specific characteristics — menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding. But those biological characteristics say nothing about whether women should vote, work, philosophize, or govern. Biology is the starting point. Oppression is the result of how culture interprets that starting point.

This distinction is central. And it took decades for the world to understand it.

The Second Sex: The Scandal of 1949

The book where Beauvoir develops all of this is called The Second Sex, published in 1949. It runs more than a thousand pages. It is dense, difficult, passionate. When it came out, the scandal was immediate. The Vatican put it on the index of banned books. Writer Albert Camus — yes, the one from our Episode 9 — told Beauvoir she had "ridiculed the French male." She responded, essentially, that she was doing exactly that. The book sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week. It was impossible to ignore.

Why was it so scandalous? Because Beauvoir didn't just talk about politics or rights. She talked about female sexuality. She talked about orgasm. She talked about how women's sexuality had been systematically denied, ignored, or instrumentalized. In 1949, that was dynamite.

But Beauvoir didn't stop at diagnosis. She also proposed a way out. If femininity is a construction, then it can be deconstructed. If oppression is learned, it can be unlearned. If destiny is manufactured, it can be rejected.

And the way out she proposed has a name familiar to those who know existentialism: freedom. Freedom as a project. Freedom as responsibility. Not the freedom to do whatever you feel like without consequences, but the freedom to take charge of your existence, to stop passively accepting the script imposed on you, to actively choose who you want to be.

Here Beauvoir adds some important nuances to the classical existentialism of Sartre. Sartre said we are radically free, that there are no excuses, that we can always choose. Beauvoir said: yes, but that freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum. Freedom is conditioned by material circumstances. A woman who has no access to education, no access to her own money, who lives in a culture that punishes her for rebelling, has a very different freedom from the bourgeois man who philosophizes in his study. Freedom is real, but it is shaped by social conditions. And that matters.

> A woman who has no access to education, no access to her own money, who lives in a culture that punishes her for rebelling, has a very different freedom from the bourgeois man who philosophizes in his study. Freedom is real, but it is shaped by social conditions.

That's why Beauvoir was something that Sartre, honestly, was not: a thinker who connected philosophy with concrete politics. Who said: it's not enough to contemplate the human condition from a Parisian terrace. You have to understand who has more or less capacity to exercise that freedom, and why.

Here's a moment where I want to pause and connect with something from everyday life.

Have you ever seen that episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza decides to do the exact opposite of what his instincts tell him, and suddenly everything starts going right? It's the episode called "The Opposite." The premise is simple: if every decision you've ever made based on your first instinct turned out badly, maybe what you need to do is ignore that instinct and do the opposite. And it works. George gets a job, gets a girl, everything improves.

That is, in very simplified and comedic terms, something similar to what Beauvoir proposes about internalized femininity. If you were taught from childhood that your first impulse should be to be agreeable, discreet, and accommodating — and that makes you unhappy — maybe the way out is to actively question it. To go against that impulse not because the impulse is bad in itself, but because it isn't yours — it was installed. The difference is subtle but enormous.

All right. Let's keep going.

Beauvoir as a Political and Literary Figure

Beauvoir didn't just philosophize. She was an active political figure. She signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971 — a document where more than three hundred famous French women publicly declared they had had abortions, at a time when abortion was illegal in France, to demand its legalization. It was an act of impressive political courage. On that manifesto were writers, actresses, intellectuals. The risk was real. Beauvoir didn't just think feminism. She practiced it.

She also wrote novels. She was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1954 — the most prestigious literary prize in France — for her novel The Mandarins. A novel about postwar Parisian intellectuals. Semi-autobiographical. Fictionalized versions of herself, of Sartre, of Camus, and of writer Nelson Algren appear in it — a man with whom she had a passionate and complicated romance that lasted years.

The story with Algren is remarkable. He was an American writer from Chicago, quite different from the Parisian intellectual world. Beauvoir met him on a trip to the United States in 1947. It was an intense relationship, full of long letters — which still survive — and intercontinental visits. Algren wanted her to stay in Chicago with him. Beauvoir couldn't. She had her life in Paris, she had Sartre, she had her world. Algren never fully forgave her. Years later he said in an interview that Beauvoir had used their shared experiences to write about them in a novel without asking his permission, and that it was a betrayal. The question of how far intimacy can be transformed into narrative material without the other person's consent is a very current philosophical and ethical debate. Beauvoir lived it firsthand.

Now, a curious detail that says a lot about how the world treated — and sometimes still treats — women philosophers. For decades, Beauvoir's work was read primarily as an appendix to Sartre's existentialism. As if she were the diligent student and he were the teacher. Sartre was the one who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 — and famously rejected it, in a legendary gesture. Beauvoir never received the Nobel, even though many consider her philosophical contribution equal to or greater than his. In university philosophy programs, The Second Sex took decades to be included as a central text. And there are still philosophy departments where it is relegated to "gender studies" courses, as if gender weren't first-rate philosophy.

Old Age, Ethics, and Philosophical Legacy

Beauvoir died in 1986, in Paris, six years after Sartre. When Sartre died in 1980, she wrote a book about his death called Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. It is one of the most extraordinary documents of intellectual love and human affection ever written. Full of lucidity and pain. She was with him until the end. And when they died, they were buried together in the Montparnasse Cemetery. None of that was obligatory. It didn't have to be that way. But they chose it.

And there is something philosophical in that itself: the way they lived together was in itself a demonstration that deep human bonds don't need a legal contract to be real.

Now, what is Beauvoir's legacy today?

It is massive. And not always obvious.

The idea that gender is a social construction, not a fixed biological given, is today a central pillar of feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. Judith Butler, an American philosopher who in the 1990s took these ideas much further, explicitly acknowledges that she built on Beauvoir's foundations. The idea of gender performativity — that gender is something you do, not something you are — has its roots in that 1949 sentence: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.

Public policy has also changed. The debate about abortion, about gender-based violence, about workplace discrimination, about the wage gap — all of these modern debates have conceptual underpinnings that Beauvoir helped to articulate philosophically. When people talk about care work as invisible labor, about the unequal distribution of domestic work as a form of oppression, about the fact that motherhood cannot be compulsory, we are speaking Beauvoirian language, even if we don't know it.

And there is something more. Beauvoir didn't just think about women. She thought about old age. She wrote a book called The Coming of Age in 1970 where she applied the same logic she had applied to gender: old age is also a social construction, also a category through which society marginalizes people, also involves a loss of the status of subject. The elderly, Beauvoir said, are also the Other. They are also defined from the outside, also reduced to a category that denies them as individuals. It was a way of extending her philosophical analysis into territory that is still uncomfortable today.

She also thought about ethics. She wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity, a book that isn't as famous as The Second Sex but is extraordinarily interesting. In it she argues that the human condition is fundamentally ambiguous — we are free and we are limited at the same time, we are individuals and we are social at the same time — and that ethics must start from recognizing that ambiguity rather than resolving it artificially.

In that text there is an implicit but powerful critique of a certain strain of existentialism that can slide into a kind of philosophical narcissism. Radical freedom without responsibility toward others can become an excuse for indifference. Beauvoir says: no. My freedom is not real if it isn't committed to the freedom of others.

> My freedom is not real if it isn't committed to the freedom of others.

That has resonance in many current debates about individualism, about the limits of personal freedom, about how far "my freedom" can be invoked to ignore the consequences of my actions on others. The person who says "I do what I want with my body and nobody tells me otherwise," and at the same time refuses to vaccinate their children, is invoking an idea of freedom that Beauvoir would have patiently but mercilessly dismantled.

There is also something in Beauvoir that connects with the idea Ricky Gervais developed in several of his works — especially the series Extras — about social expectations and the role one performs for the outside world. In Extras, Gervais's character is trapped between who he wants to be and who the world wants him to be. That tension, which Gervais explores through the most uncomfortable kind of British comedy, is exactly the tension Beauvoir diagnosed in the feminine condition: the character you are expected to play for your entire life, one you internalize so completely that you can no longer tell where the role ends and where you begin.

The question Beauvoir left open — and which remains open today — is this: how much of what you think you are is truly yours, and how much was constructed by others before you had any say? Not just regarding gender. Regarding everything. Social class, nationality, religion, aesthetic taste. All of it arrives before any genuine reflection on your part. And the genuine philosophical question is whether there is anything that can be called "self" beneath all those layers of construction.

Beauvoir believed there was. She believed in freedom as a project, as a real possibility. She didn't believe we were completely determined. But she believed that freedom was difficult, that it took work, that it involved discomfort and conflict. And that it was absolutely worth it.

In one of her most personal texts she wrote something I want to quote because it's one of those lines that stay with you: "One day life was simply beautiful, and what I wanted was for it to stay that way." Not as passivity, but as an active choice to keep betting on existence in spite of everything.

That is, at its core, what Beauvoir proposes. Not cynicism. Not resignation. Not passive acceptance of the conditions you arrived in. But the active, permanent, conscious commitment to taking charge of your own life.

Being born a woman is not a destiny. Being born into any condition is not a destiny. The condition you arrive in does not determine where you end up. That is the core of Beauvoir's thought. And it is also, I believe, one of the most liberating and most difficult philosophical messages in the history of human thought.